Ultra HD is the next-gen PC resolution—here’s why you have to have it

Dream Machine 2013 had some bitchin' hardware, but most of it was available at retail for any well-heeled hardware hound. One part, though, was not available to the unwashed masses: its glorious 4K monitor. You see, 4K was an other-worldly resolution back in mid-2013, simply because it offered four times the resolution of 1080p—at a wallet-busting expense of $3,500.

How to get into Minecraft

Minecraft is a veritable juggernaut in the PC gaming world, with a bustling mod community, dedicated Let's Play streamers, and hundreds of variations on play to keep things fresh. Nearly everywhere you go, even in department stores, you see the gaping mouths of Creepers, blank stares of Steve heads, and even diamond pickaxe styluses.

The video-card game is a lot like Hollywood. Movies like My Left Foot and The Artist take home the Oscars every year, but movies like Grown Ups 2 and Transformers 3 pull in all the cash. It's the same with GPUs, in that everyone loves to talk about $1,000 cards, but the actual bread-and-butter of the market is made up of models that cost between $100 and $150. These are not GPUs for 4K gaming, obviously, but they can provide a surprisingly pleasant 1080p gaming experience, and run cool and quiet, too.

Note: This article was originally featured in the May 2014 issue of the magazine.

Virtual water so beautiful, you'll be able to drown in it

Your fancy GPU maybe be able to render billions of pixels and triangles a second, but you’re not showing off its full technical power unless there’s something pretty to look at. You know what’s pretty to look at? Videogame water, specifically good videogame water.

We compare Wolfenstein: The New Order's low, medium, high, and ultra settings with pics and video

For this graphical analysis feature, we examine the graphical capabilities of Bethesda's Wolfenstein: The New Order. When the first-person shooter was released on PC, it had tons of graphical glitches, which included long load times and massive texture pop-in issues. Luckily, most of these problems have been sorted out with a few patches.

Photography can be impenetrable from the gear to actually shooting and then the image editing software is a whole other uphill battle. Even with Adobe introducing Lightroom as a lightweight Photoshop alternative, it can be daunting to see a screen full of sliders as a complete novice. To help get you from serial Instagramer to amateur photographer, here’s a crash course to making your images look great with just a few steps in Lightroom.

Surface RT vs. Chromebook

We’ll be honest—no one on our staff would choose a tablet or Chromebook as his or her primary portable over a full-featured laptop. Yet, we can’t deny that Google’s Chrombooks have been wildly successful sellers. The proper platform to put against Chromebooks? Surface RT. Yes, Microsoft’s original hybrid device that marked a break from x86, and one that people thought would be a game-changer. It wasn’t, but the Surface RT is still around and is now competitively priced at $300. That, folks, is Chromebook range, and makes it the perfect combatant to get into this slap fight.

Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of the magazine.

Smart Buys for Your Back to School Student

Summers never seem to last long enough, and before you know it, you're surfing the web for research rather than the ocean waves for fun. It's a bummer, but only if you let it be. Rather than slip into a deep depression as you count down the number of days until next summer, try focusing on the good things that come with going back to school, like new tech gear!

DRM issues, poor performance, and crashing servers

If you’re like us, you like the Internet, but there are unfortunately downsides to the service. It seems that over the years, developers have been releasing unfinished buggy games, hoping to just patch the situation later.